Interrogating the “Idea of the University” Through the Pleasures of Reading Together

Abstract

How and where do university staff – academics and professionals – learn about, and encounter, the interdisciplinary and critical scholarship about the idea of the university? What mechanisms are currently available for them to engage with that scholarship? And why might they want to do so? Drawing on Jeffrey J. Williams’s appeal to “teach the university” and Ronald Barnett’s theorising about how we come at understanding the university, this chapter describes and interrogates an emergent initiative we have been involved in establishing – a Reading Group – which aims to resuscitate the pleasures involved in university colleagues reading together. By doing so, we are not only schooling ourselves in the scholarly literature, we are learning how to make the university a place we want to labour in.

Keywords

Appendix: Reading List (August 2016–September 2017)

Barcan, Ruth. “The Wellbeing of Academics in the Palimpsestic University.” In Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices, 63–121. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013b.

Neary, Mike. “Student as Producer: The Struggle for the Idea of the University.” Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives 5, 1 (2016): 89–94.

Newman, John Henry. “Discourse VII. Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill.” In The Idea of a University, edited by Frank M. Turner, 108–126. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1899/1996.

Readings, Bill. “The Idea of Excellence.” In The University in Ruins, 21–43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

———. “Introduction.” In The University in Ruins, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Rowan, Leonie. “What price success? The impact of the quest for student satisfaction on university academics.” International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning 8, 2 (2013):136–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Shore, Cris. “Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university”. Social Anthropology 18,1(2010): 15–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar